AI hotel discovery is changing the way travellers find and evaluate where to stay. For decades, online discovery has largely been built around search: guests entered keywords, compared results and decided which websites to visit.
Now another behaviour is emerging.
Instead of simply searching, travellers can ask increasingly detailed questions and receive recommendations based on their specific needs.
What happens when the journey begins not with "Hotel Amsterdam Centre", but with:
Which hotel is best for a family trip to Amsterdam?
Or:
What hotel offers the best value near Schiphol?
At Global Revenue Forum Amsterdam, Bas van Tienhoven, Founder and Owner of Web It Up, explored how this shift from searching to asking is changing hotel discovery and what it could mean for hospitality businesses.
The way guests discover hotels is becoming more conversational, contextual and personalised.
In this article, we look at:
For more than two decades, online hotel discovery has largely been driven by keywords.
A traveller might search for:
Hotel Amsterdam Centre
Luxury Hotel Stockholm
Conference Venue Netherlands
The search engine then provides a list of results, leaving the traveller to evaluate the different options.
But conversational AI introduces a different behaviour.
Instead of describing what they are looking for in a handful of keywords, travellers can explain what they actually need.
They can ask which hotel is best for a particular type of trip, which property offers the best value in a specific location or where they should stay based on the experience they want.
The difference is important.
Search helps travellers find information. AI can increasingly help them interpret it.
This does not mean traditional search is disappearing.
Search engines will continue to be an important part of the travel journey. But discovery is expanding beyond the traditional search results page.
AI-powered platforms can interpret a traveller's question, understand its context and use available information to formulate an answer or recommendation.
For hospitality businesses, this means digital visibility increasingly depends on more than simply appearing for the right keywords.
The information about the hotel also needs to be sufficiently clear for both people and machines to understand.
As the White Paper highlights, hotels increasingly need to focus on clarity, relevance and authority in their digital content.
One of the most interesting aspects of this development is the changing role of recommendation.
Consider the difference between:
Hotels near Amsterdam Centraal
and:
Which hotel would you recommend near Amsterdam Centraal for a couple who wants to explore the city on foot but prefers a quiet neighbourhood?
In the first example, the traveller is presented with options.
In the second, the traveller is asking someone, or something, to help evaluate those options.
The White Paper describes this evolving journey through a simple framework:
Searching → Asking → AI Interpretation → Recommendation → Booking Decision
That additional layer of interpretation could have significant implications for how hotels think about digital discovery.
For hotel marketers, content increasingly needs to do more than target search terms.
It needs to answer genuine guest questions.
That means communicating clearly what the hotel offers, what makes it relevant and which types of experiences it can provide.
Rather than repeating keywords, content needs to be genuinely helpful.
The goal is not simply to optimise for a search engine or an AI platform. It is to provide information that is useful enough to be understood by both.
The implications extend beyond marketing.
Commercial leaders need to understand how guests are discovering their properties and recognise that visibility may increasingly extend beyond traditional search engines.
A hotel's positioning, reputation, content and digital authority can all contribute to whether it becomes part of the discovery journey.
This makes digital discoverability a longer-term commercial consideration.
It is not simply about where the hotel ranks today.
It is about how clearly the market understands the hotel tomorrow.
Hotel websites also have an important role to play.
Information should be structured clearly and be easy to interpret.
Guests, search engines and AI-powered platforms all benefit when information is relevant, accessible and unambiguous.
This does not mean creating endless amounts of content.
It means creating better information.
Information that answers the questions travellers actually have.
There is a risk that discussions about AI visibility quickly become very technical.
But the underlying change is fundamentally about guest behaviour.
Guests increasingly expect immediate and personalised answers rather than having to work through long lists of links and information themselves.
For hotels, the opportunity is therefore not simply to "optimise for AI".
It is to become better at answering the questions guests are already asking.
Businesses that provide clear and trustworthy information are more likely to be understood, discovered and ultimately recommended.
Hotel discovery is not moving from one channel to another overnight. Traditional search remains important, but the way travellers interact with information is evolving.
The key lessons are:
Perhaps the biggest shift can be summarised in one sentence from Bas van Tienhoven:
The future of search is moving from finding information towards receiving answers.
How guests discover hotels is changing, and the implications reach across marketing, Revenue Management, distribution and the wider commercial organisation.
In the latest GRF Insights White Paper, From Searching to Asking: How Guest Discovery Is Changing in the AI Era, we continue the conversation from Bas van Tienhoven's session at Global Revenue Forum Amsterdam.
